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Github turns five

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Re: Github turns five

#71

Post by heelhook »

derefr wrote: post #67
veidr wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Github is probably one of the biggest innovations in web since Google. I love GitHub as much as the next guy, but 99% of Internet users neither know what git is, nor have any need of it. There are a little more than a million users. (EDIT: well no, there are now 3 million.[2]) By contrast, Google is used by over a billion people every month.[1] [1]: http://www.statista.com/topics/1001/google/chart/899/unique-... [2…

Innovations in infrastructure are usually unknown to most of the people using that infrastructure--until they fail. Think of what would happen if Github was down for a week: how many users would now have the name "Github" on their lips (probably with a negative connotation) after some web service they do use said "sorry, the fix on that showstopper bug has been delayed a bit; Github is down, you see."

The very fact that git is distributed means that if github was down for a week your development shouldn't suffer, just become more annoying maybe, but you can easily so without GitHub I'd you know the ABC of how git works.

Your theory doesn't hold when comparing github with infrastructure everybody uses but few people know about, just because its used by many people that write programs that are used by many other users doesn't mean it's an infrastructure like an Internet backbone.

Re: Github turns five

#72

Post by heelhook »

stiff wrote: post #55
jacquesm wrote: post #41

Github mainly succeeded because of the various shortcomings in Gits command line interface. Github made certain models of cooperative development incredibly easy, and since most or almost all of the open source development is just that the time was 100% ripe for something like github. Still, it is an incredible achievement and I hope that github will be around for a very long time to come. For a laugh: http://svnhub.…

Github succeeded because they have build a fantastic platform, order of magnitude smoother, better looking, easier to use and faster than any of the similar projects. Try to navigate http://sourceforge.net/ or http://code.google.com/intl/pl/ for a while to get a feel of how free VC hosting looked like before Github - nobody approached the problem with a normal (in the industry) professional product design approach, i…

Actually, read the history of how github got started, they started exactly the way you describe: a hack put together by developers that needed that and built it as a side project without thinking about releasing it as a product.

Re: Github turns five

#73

Post by derefr »

heelhook wrote: post #71
derefr wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Innovations in infrastructure are usually unknown to most of the people using that infrastructure--until they fail. Think of what would happen if Github was down for a week: how many users would now have the name "Github" on their lips (probably with a negative connotation) after some web service they do use said "sorry, the fix on that showstopper bug has been delayed a bit; Github is down, you see."

The very fact that git is distributed means that if github was down for a week your development shouldn't suffer, just become more annoying maybe, but you can easily so without GitHub I'd you know the ABC of how git works. Your theory doesn't hold when comparing github with infrastructure everybody uses but few people know about, just because its used by many people that write programs that are used by many other use…

> your development shouldn't suffer, just become more annoying maybe

Right, that's why I wrote "has been delayed a bit", not "has been delayed indefinitely." If you run a distributed OSS project, where your main point of contact with your collaborators is through Github--and your workflow relies on using Github's collaboration features (its wiki and issue tracking, its pull requests, etc.) then Github going down can greatly impede (though not halt) that workflow. (In fact, I might say that if your workflow doesn't rely on the collaboration features, you're not really "using" Github--you're just using git, and syncing with Github, like any project which has a Subversion repo with a Github mirror.)

A more major problem with Github going down, though, would be needing to pull an update from a third-party library to fix a bug, when that library's canonical repo is stored on Github. (A problem with any centralzied repo host, really.) If you have any git:// URL dependencies in your Gemfile, or you use Bower at all, you might have a problem deploying your updates...

Re: Github turns five

#75

Post by Myrmornis »

jacquesm wrote: post #63
Myrmornis wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github would probably not have succeeded had git's command line interface been better? What rubbish. Github is a fantastic achievement. As aashaykumar92 says, making programming social and with a website that almost looks like it might be fun to normal people?? That's some achievement!

> Github would probably not have succeeded had git's command line interface been better? What rubbish. Indeed. Except that it's your words, not mine. I wrote: "Github mainly succeeded because of the various shortcomings in Gits command line interface." The message, which apparently needs to be spelled out is that using a repo through a command line is a hard thing to do for many developers nowadays who think the comm…

I stand by my comment. I see no clear difference in meaning between your wording and my rewording.

> "Github mainly succeeded because of the various shortcomings in Gits command line interface."

The success of github has nothing to do with shortcomings in git's CLI. As you say, for some people, the command line is for beards. So for them any CLI is a non-starter; nothing to do with shortcomings with git's CLI. The power available to a command line user of git is one of the reasons github is such a good thing.

Re: Github turns five

#76

Post by x-sam »

Happy birthday Github! You are rocking opensource.

It's just amazing so easily be able to fix some software, to make some commitments into project you do love!

But, 6 million repositories for 3.5 million users? Really? How many bots do you have? I'm not sure, that general user has 1.7 repository. I thought the number is higher, at least 3 or something. How many repositories do you have with forks?

Re: Github turns five

#77

Post by InclinedPlane »

veidr wrote: post #59
DigitalSea wrote: post #56

Github is probably one of the biggest innovations in web since Google. Sourceforge was okay, but it felt clunky and inaccessible, not to mention it lacked really any kind of social aspect. Github brought source control to the mainstream and made open source cool again and made it felt like an actual social thing as opposed to single developers making commits without context to a repository. If it weren't for Github I…

> Github is probably one of the biggest innovations in web since Google. I love GitHub as much as the next guy, but 99% of Internet users neither know what git is, nor have any need of it. There are a little more than a million users. (EDIT: well no, there are now 3 million.[2]) By contrast, Google is used by over a billion people every month.[1] [1]: http://www.statista.com/topics/1001/google/chart/899/unique-... [2…

Not to sound too elitist, but github is used by the people who make things, important things. How much has the existence of github contributed to the success of major projects hosted there, such as rails, bootstrap, jquery, node, coffeescript, etc?

Re: Github turns five

#78

Post by nicholassmith »

Hard to imagine a world without GitHub now, it's become that pervasive. Great service, great people there. Hopefully we'll be saying happy birthday in another 5 years with even more people using it for open source projects.

Re: Github turns five

#79

Post by jashkenas »

wycats wrote: post #43
trustfundbaby wrote: post #4

I LOVE github, their little project forever changed the way I think about & write software, and their ideas (blogposts/presentations) about how to build software are truly a massive inspiration for me. PS: Would be awesome to see who has the oldest github account on here. I joined April 20 2008.

January 11, 2008. User id 4[1] :D [1]: https://api.github.com/users/wycats

Incidentally, this id is why we call wycats the "gate to enlightenment" -- it's proof that he's the "Mu" programmer.

A monk once asked, does JavaScript have a Buddha-nature or not?

Wycats said, "nil".

The monk said, "Above to all the Haskells, below to all the crawling Javas, all have Buddha-nature. Why is it that JavaScript has not?"

Wycats said, "Because it has the nature of karmic delusions."

(http://blog.bigbinary.com/2008/06/23/why-the-id-of-nil-is-4-...)

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